March 24, 2020

B'game Town Hall - COVID-19 local updates

The City Council and City staff ran an hour-long Zoom webinar tonight to update about 175 residents on the status of various actions to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus. I thought it was very well done with kudos to the mayor and especially City Manager Lisa Goldman. The link to the recording is up on the city website here.

If you don't have an hour, here are a few of my takeaways. The County website SMChealth.org is "information central" for the most current counts of cases and for the status of shelter-in-place restrictions. It is usually updated mostly in the morning but the FAQs are continuously updated. The County is taking a number of steps to prepare for the anticipated uptick in cases. It has rented a number of B'game hotel rooms for non-hospitalization-needed cases; as well as first responders who may not have the ability to do their regular commutes. The County is also accepting volunteers' contact info and has about 1,000 volunteers already, but there is not yet a clear direction on what they might do. The same goes for our favorite local preparedness group BNN and its CERT-trained teams. More info to follow as recommended actions are decided upon.

The County has set up 211 phone service for those that may not know how or where to look on-line. I have to imagine that is more of a last resort for more complicated questions.

Similarly, if you see things in town that merit some intervention or seem non-essential--like groups of teens congregating in public or gardeners gardening-- you can call the Non-Emergency BPD phone at 650 777-4100. Officers will educate them and disperse where necessary and they have a flyer to hand out--so you should not do it yourself if you are not comfortable--and who would be? Note that housing construction and repair has been deemed an "essential service" by the county, so don't call about contractors.

The County has allocated $3M of Measure K funds to "help out" and is soliciting donations to a 501c3 named SMC Strong--more to follow when details emerge but I'm guessing you have several ideas on who needs support directly. CallPrimrose is accepting monetary donations, but no food, clothing, etc at this time.

Those are my key findings from the one-hour webcast and I believe we will be seeing more of these. In the future, we need to incorporate slides (graphics/text) so that items like phone numbers and websites don't have to be repeated verbally--people still don't reliably get them that way. This is standard stuff in the corporate world and can easily scale to meet municipal communication needs. All in all, good show. It's worth you going to view it--you probably have the time ;-(

As Moe said to the other Stooges: “Spread out.”
Who needs to spread out? Well, of course, we all in general.
But how about in general for national, economic and health security?
How about:
Silicon Valley?
Washington’s Boeing and their Silicon Valley?
New York Stock Exchange?
No more stack and pack housing?
Homeless shelters?

If government wants to save lives most effectively, they would outlaw liquor and tobacco and set a curfew of midnight just for added safety.

There was nothing specific beyond the SMC Strong fund mentioned above. There was a question on delaying property taxes which was met with a firm "no" since they need that money to fund everything else. There was also a mention by Michael Brownrigg (we can call him "Michael" again, I think) about continuing to pay housekeepers, caregivers and gardeners thru the shelter order.

On another note, I checked the SMCHealth.org site and we had 165 cases in the county as of this morning. That is a key thing to watch.

I disagree Joe, the meeting was a virtue signalling event with little or no information that I had not gleened already. 'Mayor' calling 'Vice Mayor' to chime in. I went to bed that night disturbed by the sense that they know no more than we ourselves know. No leadership and certainly there was no comforter in chief like Dr Fausi or Dr Brix.

Today's count is 274. Up 35 from yesterday, so a much lower increase than yesterday. It's just one day's data point so nothing to applaud very much.

@Winnie. I do love a contrarian! I suppose it depends on what one's expectations were going into the webcast. I wasn't expecting amazing insights--just some localized version of the wider news. I think we got that, but agree not much more.

This morning's count is 277 - only up 3 cases from yesterday! Still way too soon to relax, but going in the right direction.

I was talking to a friend in Santa Clara county yesterday who was under the impression that they were the Bay Area epicenter. So was I until I went a did the analysis. On a per capita basis, San Mateo county is was just a shade worse hit than Santa Clara county as of yesterday--so stay safe out there.

The county site (https://www.smchealth.org/coronavirus) went to a graphical dashboard for reporting, but the number of cases is the same as yesterday--309. I'm not sure what to make of that so we will see what tomorrow brings. You can now see the age distribution of the cases and the deaths.

As I recall, @ three fifths of the housing in Burlingame is Rental. I have been reading about Statewide Rental Strikes as well as a Non Eviction law that will be in place soon, if not already.
This will happen. How do all the Burlingame landlords feel about this?
How will they recoup what is owed?

There must have been some new cases on Monday that did not get into yesterday's count. The County on-line dashboard has a new look and a new total of 388 today. That is up 79 cases in two days so still linear from the trend line of last week.

The Burlingame community is raising money, lifting spirits and supporting the local economy with a charitable program buying meals for medical workers fighting on the frontlines to stop the spread of COVID-19.

An online fundraiser started to purchase lunches and dinners from Burlingame restaurants for delivery to emergency workers at Mills-Peninsula Medical Center raised approximately $21,000 overnight through crowdsourcing website GoFundMe.

Burlingame resident Jeff DeMartini said he was initially inspired to launch the fundraiser out of gratitude for those working long hours to protect the community, while exposing themselves to the threat of contracting the potentially lethal coronavirus.

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